February Flash Fiction Challenge

By Renee Miller

Thanks to everyone who submitted stories to January’s Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning story can be found here.

This month’s challenge focuses on setting. Setting is an important element in fiction writing. Done properly, it adds texture and gives the reader a sense of time and place. When writing short fiction, this element becomes even more challenging because you have so few words to tell the story, many writers don’t want to waste those on things like time and place.

You can do both. Open Book’s Writer in Residence this month is Kate Pullinger, award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing. Her novel is an excellent example of how to provide tiny details of setting without reminding the reader that she is reading. Pullinger creates a world full of colour and texture, sounds and sights, using only a line or two here and there. Weaving setting into dialogue and action, she avoids long, drawn-out descriptions that risk losing the reader and yet the imagery is alive and very vivid. I challenge you to do the same.

Your challenge for February is to take us somewhere we’ve never been. Use setting to bring a foreign land or a new world alive for us. Flash fiction is a tough medium to include vivid setting, but it is possible. In addition, in the spirit of February and Valentine’s Day, I ask that you give me a story with a romantic theme. How you go about doing this is entirely up to you. Romantic fantasy, horror, science fiction, thriller, humour; the genre is up to you as long as it has a theme that evokes thoughts of romance and love.

Now, for the technicalities:

Stories can be written in any POV but must be a maximum of 500 words. Submit by midnight (Eastern Time) March 10, 2011. Late entries will not be read. Submissions must be original unpublished works. Challenges are open to all countries.

Please send all entries with the submission pasted into the body of your email (no attachments please) to (submissions@openbooktoronto.com). Include your name, pen name (if using one), your email and the title of your entry. In the subject line please write “Open Book February Writing Submission”. The winning submission will be published with March’s challenge.

Renee Miller has written fiction in one form or another since she could hold a pen. She has written for a local newspaper and freelances for several online sites including two pages spotlighting writing and publishing in Canada. Renee also moderates a fiction writing group of about 1100 members and two Canadian literature and writing groups on Goodreads.com. She lives in Tweed, Ontario with her two children and a lucky man who insists he is not her husband.